Chapter 6
Tartus Harbor, Syria
John Clark was, at that moment, thirty feet beneath the rippling surface of the harbor in Tartus.
His long-bladed fins kicked smoothly through the cool Mediterranean Sea, propelling him with ease.
He had scythed through open water more quickly twenty years ago, but there was no hitch in his stroke, no hesitancy in his drive.
As ever, there was only one Mr. Clark.
Clark reseated his mask and sank back into the depths.
Navigation had long been a challenge underwater.
The luxury of GPS guidance wasn’t available while submerged.
For most of his career, Clark had relied on simple dead reckoning—counting kicks and tracking time.
That put one in the ballpark, but the method suffered over long distances, and strong currents could induce errors.
Thankfully, as with so many other aspects of his work, technology had come up with a solution.
Diver propulsion devices, or DPDs, had been around for decades.
Essentially underwater scooters, the battery-powered vehicles delivered operators to their targets with minimal effort.
The device Clark was using tonight was a “wet” model—breathing gear was required.
It resembled a cutaway torpedo and was guided by dive planes and a rudder that were controlled manually by the diver. None of that was new.
The revolution involved navigation.
Clark rendezvoused with his team and mounted back up on his DPD.
As briefed, the lack of any update confirmed they were on course.
He looked down at his DPD’s main display and saw a map of the harbor’s bottom in subdued green-scale hues.
The navigation software, created by a company called Greensea, used a simple sonar in the DPD’s nose to map the bottom ahead.
The vital anchorage of Tartus had become the Russian navy’s primary Mediterranean refuge in recent years, and for that reason it had been charted with unerring accuracy.
In a series of clandestine missions by unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs, the U.S.
Navy had mapped every breakwater, rock, and discarded truck tire on the harbor’s two square miles of muddy bottom.
The Greensea nav system simply compared the sonar reading to the known database, all backed up by a highly accurate inertial platform.
The foresight of the Navy’s reconnaissance effort was now paying dividends.
The other team members were driving identical DPDs.
This gave quad-redundant backup to the accuracy of their position.
Clark had paused during ingress for a cross-check of their nav performance.
He’d simply stopped, written down the precise coordinates from his display on an underwater slate, and with the aid of a dive light, displayed it to the others.
The response had been two OK signs and one headshake.
Hyori’s DPD appeared to be getting spotty sonar returns, but the positions of the other two units matched Clark’s perfectly.
Before entering the harbor, all lights had been doused except for the nav displays and a single glow stick on each DPD.
The glow sticks were color coded as a method for the team members to identify one another; they were also dim enough that they could not be seen from the surface.
The lights were necessary to maintain formation, and while everyone carried dive lights, those were for emergency use only—turning one on in a dead-black ocean would stand out like a spotlight on a dark stage.
Soon they were back underway, Clark holding a steady four knots. It was a modest terrestrial speed, basically walking at a good clip, but the sensation underwater was like running rapids. The DPDs were capable of slightly more, but a higher speed would burn battery power at a prodigious rate.
They were running on enhanced gas rebreathers—regular scuba gear would have been simpler, but the drawback of leaving a bubble trail on the surface ruled it out.
Attached to rails on the sides of the two rear DPDs were the most vital elements of their mission—four next-gen limpet mines.
Each mine weighed thirteen pounds and had a shaped high-explosive charge that was triggered by an electronic timer.
They were also hauling SIG MCX-Spear rifles with infrared coating, chambered for 7.
62 x 39–millimeter with red dot optics. The SIGs were isolated in dry bags, and while they were not expected to be used tonight, Clark and the others would have felt naked without them.
When the nav display showed their target to be fifty yards ahead, Clark brought his DPD to a stop.
He adjusted the craft’s buoyancy and it sank gently to the bottom.
When his fins touched the seabed, his depth gauge showed forty-four feet.
The others settled beside him. The DPDs would remain here, the team swimming the remaining distance.
Each man clipped a single limpet mine to his equipment belt.
Clark took a careful compass shot, checked the tritium glow of his dive watch, and began counting kicks as he set out again.
He ascended to twenty feet, his eyes scanning the surface.
He had spent a good portion of his life underwater, beginning in Navy SEAL training.
Yet even for the most experienced frogmen, being submerged in open water at night was a disorienting experience.
The weightlessness of neutral buoyancy was part of the problem, but worst of all was the darkness.
Tonight, thankfully, the visibility was decent.
There was a partial moon, and he could see the lights of the city of Tartus dancing on the choppy surface.
They had been given a final update on their target’s position immediately before the dive.
The coordinates were supposedly good to within a few feet, but they were an hour old.
The wind might have shifted since then, and the mere swing of a ship on its anchor could bring a change of a hundred yards.
The first thing Clark discerned was little more than a shadow.
A growing void on the surface, where no light permeated.
The shadow soon resolved to a solid outline.
He couldn’t see the entire length of the ship—it was, after all, over three hundred feet long, and the harbor’s waters weren’t exactly crystalline—but there was no mistaking the gentle curve of its hull and the darkened keel.
He led the team toward the stern, and they surfaced near the rudder. The shape of the aft hull created a large overhang, a well of sorts, meaning they couldn’t be seen from the ship’s deck. They were a quarter mile from the nearest pier, and the breakwater, far off the bow, was empty at this hour.
Clark removed his mouthpiece, and the others mirrored the move. He heard the sound of distant traffic and the gentle lap of waves against the hull.
“Status?” he asked.
Wu and Bauer replied they were good to go.
Hyori said, “All good except for my nav unit. Something squirrel.”
“Squirrelly,” said a grinning Wu in his East London accent. It had become a unit trend in recent weeks to mangle odd American phrases.
“I think she might sink without our help,” said Bauer as he looked up at the beaten hull.
Everyone stared at the ever-serious German.
It was the closest he’d ever come to humor.
But he had a point. In the dim ambient light, Clark saw a barnacle-encrusted rudder shaft and rust-flecked hull.
Ships always looked worse up close, but this one wasn’t long for the maritime world.
“Okay,” Clark said. “She’s in the right spot, but we can’t rely on that. Our orders were clear—we have to make a positive ID before acting.”
Their target’s name was Draco II. Or at least, that’s what had been painted on her bow in recent weeks. In truth, she’d had no fewer than eight names in the last year. And that, indirectly, was why Clark and his team were here.
Draco II was part of Russia’s ever-expanding ghost fleet, one of hundreds of vessels of various tonnage and utility that spanned the globe.
Sometimes they moved legitimate cargo. More often they smuggled contraband on behalf of the regime.
The CIA had been tracking Draco II for five months.
In that time, she had hauled guns and rockets to Eritrea, smuggled banned oil-refining equipment to Vladivostok, and carried a thousand tons of hijacked battery-grade manganese sulfate out of Gabon.
In the course of it all, and much to the annoyance of certain Western allies, she had also dragged her anchor to cut seven undersea cables.
The ship’s registration had all the fidelity of a Dalí portrait gone through a blender.
Her ownership had changed nine times in the last year, and flags of convenience flew on her stern like yesterday’s wet laundry.
Analysts jested that her crew swaps were so constant the gangway needed a revolving door.
Her name was altered regularly, including twice on one voyage—as reported by a Danish naval officer—by a paintbrush-wielding Vietnamese crewman dangling over the side.
Artemis, Kongo, Gamma V, Corona Sky. As subterfuge went, it was as brazen as it was guileless.
The objective, or so it seemed, was not to fly under the radar of Western intelligence services, but rather to induce their fatigue.
The Russian Federation ran nearly a thousand such vessels.
They steamed across the world, jinking, morphing, and causing all manner of chaos.
Russia had for years banked on the assumption that tracking or interdicting any particular one wouldn’t be worth the trouble.
Until, one day, it was.